It's the Word of the Day podcast for September 28th.
Today's word is kerfuffle, spelled K-E-R-F-U-F-F-L-E.
Kerfuffle is a noun.
It's an informal word that refers to a disturbance or fuss typically caused by a dispute or conflict.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Teen Vogue quoting Ashley Lyle.
I find it fascinating that the media landscape and the world of storytelling has so many examples of Tony Sopranos and Walter White's and Don Draper's and I am hard-pressed to think of as many characters who are women who are given the opportunity to be terrible people and still get their story told.
I think that because people are unaccustomed to that, it's a little bit more shocking,
and it's clearly having an impact on the fandom.
I've taken a step back from Reddit and social media,
but enough of it gets through to me that I am at least aware that there is some kerfuffle happening on this front.
Fuffle is an old Scottish verb that means to must or to throw into disarray,
in other words, to literally ruffle someone's figurative feathers.
The addition of car, c-a-r,
possibly from a Scottish Gaelic word meaning wrong or awkward, didn't change its meaning much.
In the 19th century, kerfuffle, with its variant kerfuffle, became a noun,
which in the 20th century was embraced by a broader population of English speakers and standardized to kerfuffle,
referring to a more figurative feather ruffling.
There is some kerfuffle among language historians over how the altered spelling came to be favored.
One theory holds that it might have been influenced by onomatopoeic words like kerplunk that imitate the sound of a fallen object hitting a surface.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.